How reCAPTCHA works in Atlassian Cloud including Jira, JSM, and Confluence
Platform Notice: Cloud Only - This article only applies to Atlassian products on the cloud platform.
Summary
reCAPTCHA is a security feature used to distinguish human users and automated bots accessing a website or online service.
Sometimes, verifying reCAPTCHA fails with an error message like "We are having trouble verifying reCAPTCHA for this request. Please try again."
Solution
Resolve reCAPTCHA verification failures
If you see repeated reCAPTCHA errors similar to the above, we recommend you:
Try a different browser
Try incognito mode or private browsing
Try a different device, such as a separate computer
If using a VPN, disable it. Google documentation states this under the section Uninstall the VPN from your computer or network, or contact your VPN provider
Where available, use a different connection, like mobile data or 5G, instead of Wi-Fi
Does the Google reCAPTCHA demo pass or fail while on particular network(s) or machines
Check if there is anything on the network specifically that is causing Google to think there is a bot or automation on their network(s)
Check if IPv6 is being used. Try IPv4 if possible
Confirm that network calls to the domains below are not blocked. For more information, please see Partner domains. Connections to certain domains need to be allowed to ensure Atlassian cloud services work as expected
*.gstatic.com
*.recaptcha.net
Examples of reCAPTCHA appearing in Atlassian products
reCAPTCHA verification is required in Atlassian products such as Jira and Confluence, after:
Multiple failed login attempts
The system suspects suspicious activity
Being invited to a site
During product authentication
Users may be prompted to complete reCAPTCHA verification on https://id.atlassian.com when logging in or during the user sign-up flow.
Users may complete the verification checks, but continue to see an error related to reCAPTCHA considering validation. This is often due to a secondary check that considers various elements such as browser or network connection data.
Atlassian Admin Hub
Specific actions within https://admin.atlassian.com, like user invites, trigger a reCAPTCHA validation in the background. Users are not prompted to complete a verification when inviting others, but in cases where reCAPTCHA validation returns a low score, they will see the error: "Something went wrong."
Analyzing the network traffic will show the following error:
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{
"key": "automationNotAllowed",
"context": {
"message": "Automation is not allowed."
}
}Jira Service Management (JSM) customer portal
The JSM customer portal also utilizes reCAPTCHA to protect sites from spam or malicious issue creation. When users fail the verification process or have a low reCAPTCHA score on the backend validation, tickets can't be submitted with the following error: "We couldn't verify that you're not a robot. Try sending the request again."
If issues continue to persist, Atlassian Support can assist. reCAPTCHA can sometimes be turned off within the Admin Hub and the Jira Service Management customer portal.
This feature can't be turned off for authentication and sign-ups via https://id.atlassian.com.
Related feature requests and bug reports
We have multiple feature requests and bugs identified to improve Captcha management:
ID-8310 - Allow administrators to disable CAPTCHA for specific users
ID-8114 - Unable to invite users through the Invite Users button
ID-8331 - Allow Captcha to be enabled for logging in to the Atlassian cloud
ID-8345 - reCAPTCHA V2 fallback if reCAPTCHA V3 give a false positive
JSDCLOUD-8217 - Provide the ability to turn on and off Captcha in the Customer Portal
JSDCLOUD-11177 - Allow administrators to disable RECAPTCHA for specific customers
We encourage you to upvote and add yourself as a watcher to the suggestion ticket, so that you may be notified of any updates. For more details on how we address these, please refer to our implementation of the new feature policy.
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